Brother

Brother MFC-L3780CDW

Color laserTonerBrother Refresh EZ Print

Everything in one box and nearly fifty pounds of it: 31 pages a minute in colour and black, a 50-sheet feeder that scans both sides in one pass, automatic duplex printing, fax, Gigabit Ethernet and a 3.5-inch touchscreen — the largest control panel in this catalogue. For a small office that runs on colour paperwork it is the most capable machine here, and the duplex scanner is the feature that quietly saves the most time. The toner arithmetic does not improve with the price: the same TN229XL cartridges give about three cents a black page and nineteen cents for a full-colour one, so a busy office will spend more on toner in two years than on the printer. If most of your colour printing could be black and white, a mono laser plus the occasional colour job elsewhere is genuinely cheaper.

Approx. price: ~$569
Cost per mono page: 3.2¢
Cost per colour page: 19¢
Cost to own, 5,000 pages: ~$891
Print speed, mono: 31 ISO ppm

Best for

A small office that prints and scans colour paperwork in volume and wants one machine to do all of it.

marks an estimate. Computed from the consumable's ISO page yield and its list price. An estimate. Purchase price plus ink or toner over the pages shown, assuming four mono pages for every colour page. Price is an approximate snapshot from our last catalogue update.

What it costs to own

Black consumable: Brother TN229XL high-yield black toner · 3,000 ISO pages · ~$96.29
Colour consumable: Brother TN229XL high-yield colour toners · 2,300 ISO pages · ~$123.49 each
Cost per mono page: 3.2¢
Cost per colour page: 19¢
Cost to own, 5,000 pages: ~$891
Cost to own, 200 pages/month for 3 years: ~$1,032 (7,200 pages)

Computed from the consumable's ISO page yield and its list price. An estimate. How this is worked out

Cost to own · 5,000 pages

Brother MFC-L3780CDW~$891
~$569 printer + ~$322 supplies
Brother HL-L3280CDW~$666
~$344 printer + ~$322 supplies
Brother HL-L3220CDW~$621
~$299 printer + ~$322 supplies

purchase priceink or toner. An estimate: purchase price plus 5,000 pages at each printer’s computed cost per page, assuming 4 mono pages for every colour page. Printers whose consumable price we could not source are left out.

Specifications

Manufacturer-published figures. Cost lines are computed from the consumable figures above and are estimates.

Approx. price: ~$569
Cost per mono page: 3.2¢
Cost per colour page: 19¢
Cost to own, 5,000 pages: ~$891
Cost to own, 3 years: ~$1,032
Technology: LED
Ink system: Toner
Inks: 4
Black consumable: Brother TN229XL high-yield black toner · 3,000 pages
Colour consumable: Brother TN229XL high-yield colour toners · 2,300 pages
Ink in the box: 1,000 pages
Third-party ink lock: No
Ink subscription: Brother Refresh EZ Print
Print speed, mono: 31 ISO ppm
Print speed, colour: 31 ISO ppm
First page out: 12.5 s
Functions: Print · Copy · Scan · Fax
Two-sided printing: Auto
Document feeder: 50 sheets
Two-sided scanning: Single pass
Paper capacity: 250 sheets
Max paper size: Legal
Borderless photo: No
Resolution: 2400 × 600 dpi
Connectivity: Wi-Fi · Ethernet
Mobile printing: AirPrint · Mopria
Display: 3.5" colour touchscreen
Dimensions: 16.1 × 18.2 × 15.8 in
Weight: 47.8 lb
Released: 2023

Features

31 ppm in both black and colour
50-sheet feeder with single-pass two-sided scanning
3.5-inch colour touchscreen, the largest here
Gigabit Ethernet, dual-band Wi-Fi and fax
Automatic two-sided printing

Document feeder Auto duplex Two-sided scanning No ink lock Ethernet Fax

In its favour

Single-pass two-sided scanning from a 50-sheet feeder
31 ppm in colour, the fastest colour machine in this catalogue
3.5-inch touchscreen is the best control panel here
Fax, Gigabit Ethernet and duplex printing all included
Output is permanent and smear-proof straight out of the tray
Scan-to-network-folder and scan-to-email are configured on the printer itself rather than through a phone app
A 250-sheet cassette and a 50-sheet feeder keep a long job running without attention

Against it

Roughly 19¢ a four-colour page — a busy office will outspend the purchase price on toner within two years
47.8 lb and nearly 16 inches tall
Four toners plus a drum, belt and waste box to replace over its life
Photo output is document-grade only
The most expensive laser in this catalogue

What owners say

Distilled from owner discussions and long-term published reviews

The most capable machine in this catalogue for an office that runs on colour paperwork, and owners who need all of it are glad it exists. Thirty-one pages a minute in colour, a 50-sheet feeder that captures both sides in one pass, fax, Gigabit Ethernet and a 3.5-inch touchscreen.

The honest caveat is the same one that applies to every colour laser here, only larger because the volume is larger: the toner will cost more than the printer did, and sooner than expected. Owners who print mostly black-and-white with occasional colour tend to conclude afterwards that a mono laser plus an occasional trip to a print shop would have been cheaper. Owners who genuinely print colour in volume, and need it to survive being handled, are in the right place.

What owners like

Single-pass two-sided scanning is the feature owners describe as quietly saving the most time
31 ppm in colour, fast enough that a long colour deck is not a coffee break
The 3.5-inch touchscreen is the best control panel in this catalogue and owners notice
Fax, Gigabit Ethernet and duplex printing all included
Permanent output that survives filing, handling and highlighters

Common complaints

Roughly nineteen cents a four-colour page — a busy office outspends the purchase price on toner within a couple of years
47.8 lb, and owners consistently report underestimating it
Four toners plus a drum, belt and waste box over its life
Overkill, and expensive, for a household that mostly prints black and white

Questions that keep coming up

What does single-pass duplex scanning actually save?

It reads both faces of every sheet in one trip through the feeder. Without it, a double-sided stack goes through once, gets re-stacked, goes through again, and then has to be interleaved into the right order. Owners who archive double-sided paperwork describe it as the feature they would not give up.

How fast does the toner actually go?

At Brother's own prices — $96.29 for 3,000 black pages and $123.49 for 2,300 pages of each colour — a page using all four toners is around nineteen cents. An office printing a few thousand colour pages a year will spend more on toner than the printer cost within about two years. That is normal for colour laser, not a fault of this machine.

Is it too big for a home office?

It is 47.8 lb and nearly 16 inches tall, and owners report being surprised by it in person. It wants a dedicated surface at a sensible height, because the feeder and the touchscreen both need to be reachable. If space is tight, the print-only HL-L3280CDW is fourteen pounds lighter.

Computed from the consumable's ISO page yield and its list price. An estimate. Owner notes are a summary of what people who own the machine report, not a test result — there is no lab behind this site.